How Do Privacy Rights Extend To Sexual Orientation - Essay Example

How Do Privacy Rights Extend To Sexual Orientation? Privacy is an extremely important and incredibly sensitive subject in the American society of today. Issues relating to privacy are ironically always fought out in the public domain with some groups arguing against certain aspects of the law and others for it. In the absence of a consensus, it is difficult to decide such issues and also to evolve a legal system that would ensure that the privacy of people is protected. In such issues, it is mostly the groups that are already marginalized that stand to lose the most.

Women and homosexuals are the people who suffer the most when it comes to arguments that center around privacy, two of the most important issues regarding privacy being those concerning one’s sexual orientation and the right to abortion. The different laws that have been enacted in the United States of America and the roles that have been played by the Supreme Court and the political parties have to be taken into account when one is analyzing the reasons for the marginalization of the homosexual community and the reluctance that society has had in opening up to this community.

In certain cases, the Supreme Court has refused to accord the same status to homosexual couples as heterosexual couples (Government by the People). This automatically assigns to these couples lower status that would induce them to conceal their sexual orientation a secret. In a lot of cases, people fail to recognize their own orientations because of the social stigma that is caused by judgments that place them on a lower level than their ‘straight’ counterparts. In these cases, there is a covert intrusion into the lives of these people that the state effects.

While invading the privacy of these groups by marking locations where their sexuality can be expressed in terms of the very geographical boundaries within which people of a certain sexual orientation are allowed to make their sexual choices (the rights that homosexual couples have varies from one state to the other), the state also drags their problems into the public domain, thus making them face the stigma of a homophobic society. There are also cases when individuals of a homosexual orientation are not allowed to participate in certain associations which consist of only members of their own sex (Government by the People).

This limits the choices that people of this community have and makes them take decisions that affect their privacy greatly. In the case of politicians, in many cases, they refuse to intervene in matters that are connected to homosexuality and the rights to privacy that homosexual couples and individuals have. As a result of the conservatism that pervades many section of the American society that are in many ways influenced by religion, members of political parties do not intervene in providing members of homosexual communities their rights.

It is a direct consequence of the lesser rights that this community receives from their societies that their privacy is affected.Works CitedMagleby, David B; Light, Paul C. (2009).Government by the People. New York: Longman.